


Secrets

by GoringWriting



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wings, Hurt Tony Stark, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Team as Family, Tony Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 01:02:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17736056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoringWriting/pseuds/GoringWriting
Summary: Tony Stark has four secrets after he's rescued from that cave. Some secrets he keeps some he lets be discovered and some he just assumes people know.





	Secrets

Tony made it away from the Ten Rings with four secrets, his chest, his wings, his leg, and his suit. These secrets took so much from him but they also gave something. Not only to him but the world as a whole. 

They gave everyone Iron Man.

Picking and choosing which secrets to keep and which to reveal proved to be easy. When he got back to the US he didn't have enough time to build a prosthetic for his leg so he let the world know about that. It was just a leg after all...okay Tony definitely knows he needs better coping methods denying the problem exists probably isn't healthy.

Keeping the suit and the arch reactor a secret are the easiest decisions he's ever made. The reactor because it could kill him and the suit because people would want him to build another...to build another weapon for their use.

Kinda defeats the purpose of the press conference he's holding.

The wings are harder. Sure people rarely let their wings out in public unless they're flying, fighting, or flirting. But Tony has never been shy about having his wings out.

After all, it's harder to attack someone from behind if there are huge fucking wings in the way.

Tony decides to keep them a secret. At least until he can have a prosthetic put in. And he doesn't care if they don't bristle when he's angry or flutter when he's flirting.

But by Tesla they will fly.

He will not let flying be taken away from him.

Tony's not even sure people notice his wings if he's being honest. The synthetic feathers are so close to his original coloring that they nearly look identical if it weren't for the metallic shine that they have sometimes.

A little work and they stop shining and even Rhodey can barely tell the difference.

Tony can tell, but he is excellent at avoiding things and he avoids thinking about his wings all the time. 

He's probably turned it into an Olympic sport by now.

There are some people who know all four secrets and some that only know one or two.

Pepper, Rhodey and Happy know all four. He tells them or they find out at different times but they all know. Happy even starts keeping his wings out and standing at Tony's back to guard him. 

The board of directors at SI know only about the leg. If they knew about the suit or the reactor they would want mass production and Tony is smelling something rotten in the state of Denmark...so it's gonna be a no from him.

Obadiah knew all four but Tony only thought he knew about two. He'd shown Obadiah the reactor after he thought someone told him, and everyone knew about the leg. 

Tony didn't know until the end that Obadiah had tracked down the suit and watched video of Tony's wings being severed piece by piece.

Agent Agent, Tony assumes, knew about the suit and the leg. He knew the reactor existed, probably, but not what it's function was, until that unfortunate incident when he threatened to taze him.

The whole world knew about the leg and after his battle with Ironmonger they knew about the suit. 

Tony could live that.

When he meets Loki he's kinda surprised that his wings are hidden. Usually guys like that want to make themselves look as big and menacing as possible and nothing screams that like puffing yourself out like some kind of ostrich.

But no, the entire plane ride Loki keeps his wings hidden. He easily could have used them to fight them or escape the plane. Tony is just starting to wonder if maybe Asgardians don’t have wings when Thor shows up his wings stretched out and snatches Loki away.

They’re on the helicarrier listening to Thor explain some things. Captain America with his ugly red, white, and blue wings, an obvious dye job if you ask Tony, on display constantly communicating his dominance to everyone.

Tony has the give the guy some credit though. When he realizes that it isn’t the social norm anymore he politely tucks his wings back in. Sometimes he slips but watching Cap blush and tuck them back in is fun.

Thor on the other hand bounces around with his wings out and flapping all over the place. He’s also especially fond of tucking Tony under them. 

Tony won’t admit it but it’s warm and quiet under there.

It’s Thor that figures out that Loki is being mind controlled too. Something about Loki’s eyes and a hard (but not too hard) hit to the head has Loki snapping back to himself with enough time to stop Barton from continuing with the plan.

Thor is so happy that his brother is back to himself that he practically tackles him to the floor.

“So what happens to him now?” Clint asks eyeing Loki. It had come as quite a shock to everyone, Loki most of all, that the archer wanted to be friends with Loki. Something about them knowing what the other went through and being able to understand. 

It was actually Loki that was the wrench in that plan. He was still a little skittish around all of them, but Barton most of all. Likely because of the guilt he was feeling after mind controlling Clint. Every time the two were in the same room it was a battle to see if Loki could leave the room faster than Clint could begin talking to him.

“I will take him back to Asgard and he will likely be imprisoned for his crimes there,” Thor says staring at the ground.

“You’re going to lock up a torture victim?” Clint asks.

“He was not tortured when he committed his crimes against Asgard,” Thor says looking over to where the dark haired man is showing Bruce how to whittle. That had been a friendship that no one had seen coming. The Doctor didn’t make Loki talk he just let him talk.

“What if he doesn’t go back to Asgard?” Tony asks shifting in his seat a little because a strip of skin is pinched between two of his feathers and it’s uncomfortable.

“Friend Anthony, where would he go? He cannot go to Jotunheim or Niflheim, and Vanaheim is the first place Father would search,” Thor says.

“He can stay with me...actually you all can. I was gonna wait to invite everyone at once but yeah, this is as a good a time as any.”

“You want us to move in with you?” Clint asks slightly surprised and Tony wonders why.

“Yeah, I have tons of room, and I can feel Fury trying to find a way to make me do it so I’m not gonna give him the satisfaction of it. So, I’m going to beat him to the punch,” Tony says.

“You would allow my brother to stay with you?” Thor asks.

“Of course. I have the space and I’m not about to allow him to be locked up,” Tony says.

It only takes a month for everyone to trickle in. First to move in were Bruce and Loki. Then,Thor comes back from telling his father that Loki vanished after being freed from the scepter’s control.

The spy twins are next, with Clint taking the closest floor to Loki and Natasha taking the one just below Clint. 

It takes Steve three weeks to move in but when he finally does everyone welcomes him with open arms. 

Tony hadn’t thought through how hard it would be to keep his two main secrets when living with a bunch of other people. 

If you had asked Tony he would have told you that his leg was the one thing that wasn’t a secret. Anyone who was alive when he was kidnapped knows about his leg. He wasn’t exactly able to hide it from the various cameras during his press conference. Sure Loki and Thor are aliens but one of the others probably told them already.

So, he’s the one surprised when he wakes up from a nap on the couch and reaches for his prosthetic, to put it back on. 

“What?” Tony asks when he sees everyone staring at him.

“Your…” Clint says.

“My leg, yeah. It’s been gone for a while now actually. Longer than I’ve been Iron Man,” Tony says and tries not to feel self conscious. “You guys seriously didn’t know? I did a live press conference with it missing.”

“I was in Calcutta...We didn’t have TVs where I was,” Bruce says.

“I was in the ice,” Steve says.

“We were on Asgard,” Loki and Thor say at the same time making Thor grin and Loki scowl but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“I was deep undercover in a jungle,” Clint says.

“And you Nat? You spend time with me as my PA. Surely you knew,” Tony says and Natasha simply does that scary glare she does when she doesn’t want to answer something.

“How…” Steve asks softly looking at the stump and Tony snaps his prosthetic back into place causing Cap’s eyes to shoot back up to his face, where they should be thank you very much.

“Kidnapped,” Tony says and gets up and walks to his lab to get away from their stares.

The suit wasn’t really a secret to anyone anymore and Tony knows for a fact that they all know about the suit. If they didn’t Tony has Bellevue on speed dial for them.

When they ask what inspired him to create Iron Man he says one word, “kidnapped.”

He told Bruce about the reactor on the helicarrier. But he never thought about telling the rest of the team about it. None of them have the technical know how to understand it. Tony may be notorious for his arrogance and for flaunting his intelligence. But this is different. These aren’t bullies that he’s trying to show up. These are friends that he actually likes.

Normally when he is forced up to go to team movie nights he’ll wear thick black shirts, wrap his chest, and snuggle under a blanket. Unfortunately this time around they spring one on him last minute when he’s wearing a thin white tank top in his lab. 

Tony wonders if the blanket will be enough to hide it when he sees Loki curled up under it looking like a grumpy cat because Clint is tucked under there with him. Tony crosses his arms over his chest and wonders if maybe he can use Thor’s wing as a blanket. But before he can ask the lights are going out and there’s no mistaking the slight blue glow, and there’s no mistaking where it is coming from.

“What is that?” Clint asks and his eyes widen when he sees the origin of the light, “I thought that was just part of your suit...what does it do?” Clint asks.

“High tech pacemaker,” Tony says and Bruce shoots him a look.

“How’d you get it?”

“Kidnapped,” Tony says and gets up to go to his lab because as much as he doesn’t want to make them feel dumb, watching how long it takes for them to process new information is worse than brain freeze.

Tony refuses to let anyone outside of Pepper and Rhodey know about his wings. It’s his business and he knows that people can ignore common injuries. Pacemakers, even though that’s not the right description, and missing limbs are things that are a lot more common than missing wings.

Besides of all the things that they are likely to find about him, his wings are the one that is most likely to earn him pity and he doesn’t want that. He’ll never want that.

He discovers a new secret when he’s in the basement gym and has to go near the pool. 

The flashback hits him so hard he can almost feel the water filling him again and he has to run back upstairs.

Apparently his fear of water was a secret from everyone including himself. He’ll have to find a way to tell Rhodey about it without mentioning what exactly caused the fear. He feels bad but he just can’t tell Rhodey what happened over there. He has his own traumas to handle. He doesn’t need to have Tony’s too.

It’s actually on a SHIELD training exercise when the team finds out about his wings. 

The idea was to get Tony used to fighting when he wasn’t in the suit just in case something happened and he needs to defend himself while waiting for a new one to arrive. 

He doesn’t bother telling them that his Aunt Peggy started teaching him everything she knew when he was three. When you’re the son of a wealthy man you either get kidnapped a lot or you learn to protect himself.

He’s still laughing at the reaction to his weapons training exercise. Seriously? He was a weapons designer, how the fuck would he build weapons without knowing how to fucking fire one?

He stops laughing when Fury says, “For you’re next exercise you are going up against Magneto and he’s just disarmed all of you,” Fury says and flips a switch and everything metal shoots towards the ceiling and Tony screams because he can feel the metal in his wings being pulled upwards along with the metal in his reactor and leg.

“Fury shut it off!” Tony says and the magnetic pull on his wings is the only thing keeping him on his feet. For a few moments Fury looks like he’s not going to shut it off. Was this some clever way of killing him and getting insurance money?

Tony panics and undoes the piece connecting his leg to his knee and it goes flying towards the ceiling and then he pulls off his shirt to undo the clasps of his wings and they too go shooting up towards the ceiling.

Fury shuts off the magnet before Tony has to think about his reactor and Loki eases the fall of Tony’s wings and leg so they don’t break.

“What...what happened to your wings?” Steve asks.

“Kidnapped. I need my lab now!” Tony snaps and Loki snaps his fingers and a portal forms and Tony bolts through it his prosthetics following him through.

He stays in his lab for three days, the first is removing any and all magnetic material from his reactor and leg. That was a weakness he should have seen coming. Especially with Magneto becoming more and more active.

The second and third are to make sure that his wings have an automatic detaching mechanism so that doesn’t happen again.

Loki bring him food on the third night and places it in front of Tony’s wings. 

“There’s a material on Vanaheim, strong and sturdy and capable of passing for feathers. At least to midgardians,” Loki says sitting on the table.

“Why are you telling me this?” Tony asks and jumps back as what looks like a bundle of feathers is tossed in front of him.

“I don’t need your pity feathers Loki,” Tony says even though the material feels like actual feathers, just as Loki said.

“It is not pity Anthony. It is payment. If you make a pair of wings with the material I ask that you make a second set.”

“A second set for who? There aren't really many people around here missing wings,” Tony says.

“There’s me,” Loki says softly. So softly that Tony has to look up to make sure he heard right and he lets out a gasp when he sees Loki’s wings.

Tony thinks that they were once white or light colored but now they are burnt black. They look like there were set on fire.

“Kidnapped?” Tony asks and Loki nods. Tony hugs him and three weeks later he and Loki have a matching set of wings that Loki even manages to help connect to their nervous systems so that they behave like real wings.

Tony is amazed at how different this feels. Knowing that there is another person who understands what it’s like. They even flitter when he flirts shamelessly and press back when he’s angry.

And they fly, just as his old wings did. Loki and him will preen their wings and Tony just feels lighter. There’s no metal in them. No magnets to worry about, and he is even able to make them easier to remove because the harness doesn’t have to be as strong because of the new material.

He even lets Loki touch his wings. He’s the first person to do so outside of Tony’s close circle of friends. 

At first it’s small touches. To make the connection between his wings and nervous system and muscles. Then to examine the material, and then to help when paper or random feathers from popped pillowcases. 

Then it turned into full on grooming and cleaning the wings and Tony can’t help the goosebumps that appear on his skin when Loki will settle behind him to untangle the feathers. 

It comes as no surprise to anyone when the two of them start dating. Apparently there had been a betting pool about it.

What had surprised him was an apology from Fury for the magnet. However they can all agree that it is a good thing that it happened in a controlled environment and no when they were out on the field facing someone who controls metal and would use the wings against him.

Turns out that they didn’t have to worry. Turns out Magneto’s wings were apparently damaged when he was put in a concentration camp. Tony was happy to make a new set and even manages to get Magneto to think about some more constructive methods to obtain mutant rights as opposed to purely meaningless destruction. 

It isn’t long before HYDRA bunkers start being discovered with metal pipes sticking out of floors and walls along with extensive evidence proving human experimentation, which Tony turns over to the appropriate channels.

The strange thing is that there seems to be files about subjects still living yet they were nowhere to be found.

And if Tony sees a person or two matching those file’s pictures when he goes to visit Xavier to work on mutant rights.

That’ll just be another secret.


End file.
